David Betras could see trouble coming. The Democratic Party chairman in Youngstown, Ohio, wrote to Hillary Clinton's advisers in May warning she needed to put a jobs-focused message at the heart of her White House campaign or else watch blue-collar voters in states like Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania slip away to Republican Donald Trump. Clinton never responded to Betras, and in the final weeks of her campaign she spent much of her time portraying Trump as unfit, rather than highlighting her economic plans.

WASHINGTON -- As a presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump vowed to refill the cells of the Guantánamo Bay prison and said American terrorism suspects should be sent there for military prosecution. He called for targeting mosques for surveillance, escalating airstrikes aimed at terrorists and taking out their civilian family members, and bringing back waterboarding and a "hell of a lot worse" -- not only because "torture works," but because even "if it doesn't work, they deserve it anyway."

It is hard to know how much of this stark vision for throwing off constraints on the exercise of national security power was merely tough campaign talk. But if the Trump administration follows through on such ideas, it will find some assistance in a surprising source: President Obama's have-it-both-ways approach to curbing what he saw as overreaching in the war on terrorism. read more

Yeast microbes from the world's oldest bottle of beer -- a 220-year-old bottle found in one of Australia's earliest shipwrecks -- are being used to create a new, modern beer with the characteristic taste of the 18th-century brew. The yeast was grown from the contents of a bottle of beer recovered from the wreck of the Sydney Cove, a British trading ship that got caught in a storm near the island of Tasmania, off Australia's south coast, in 1797 while on its way from Calcutta to the prison colony at Port Jackson, now the city of Sydney. read more